about the travel During an annual art cycling tour ('Kunst van Hier tot Ginder') on 17 and 18 June 2006 the Bibliobox was on display in the newly opened ‘Noaberhuus’ in Okkenbroek. Okkenbroek is a village with 500 inhabitants in the Municipality of Deventer (Province of Overijssel, Netherlands).

Over 1500 cyclists participated in the tour. The summer market and various exhibitions along the route attracted hordes of visitors. Here you can see pictures of the outside and inside of the ‘Noaberhuus’, which served as a stop-off point. There is also a photo of a performance and a work of art, The Donkey by Florentijn Hofman, which the cyclists encountered along the way.

Kunst van Hier tot Ginder is an annual art cycling tour, which crosses the rural countryside between Okkenbroek and Deventer. Performers, artists and poets are invited to work and mount exhibitions in the villages and in attractive landscape settings. This generates all sorts of new encounters between artists, local residents and city-dwellers. The main purpose is to encourage professional artists from different disciplines to reflect in a ‘site-specific’ manner on the local situation. There is also a flanking programme featuring performing arts, art education activities (excursions, contributions from primary schools), amateur art (competition, drama) and local entrepreneurship (summer market, bed & breakfast, catering). One of the driving impulses for this event is the ongoing metamorphosis and current ‘identity crisis’ of the countryside and the need for new, clearly defined initiatives.

about the host The host, Kunstenlab Deventer, teamed up with Harry Soeteman, who set out the Bibliobox on a table in the ’Noaberhuus’ in Okkenbroek so that the cyclists could make an initial acquaintance with it. The ‘Noaberhuus’ is a complex consisting of 10 sheltered housing units, 4 apartments for people with learning difficulties and a building which houses various amenities for the entire village. The ‘Noaberhuus’ was built according to the principle of the Swedish Culture House and has given an extra boost to the efforts to revitalise the countryside. On Thursday 22 June, the Muncipality of Overijssel awarded the ‘Noaberhuus’ the reconstruction prize for 2006.